Ethnic Groups and the Practice of Medicine

Abstract

EDICAL practice in a city may be M viewed as a system resulting from competition between physicians for the more desirable practices and the efforts of patients to obtain the best physicians available. If physicians were guided solely by the financial position of patients and if patients could select their physicians on the basis of their relative technical competence, then a simple economic system would result. Since patients are generally unable to judge practitioners in terms of technical competence, extraneous factors actually determine their choice.' Accordingly, the competitive position of a doctor is greatly influenced by his ability to fulfill expectations which are not medically relevant. This implies that the performance of the physician role-despite its high status, relatively specific function, and limitation to persons properly trained and legally sanctionedis greatly affected by the doctor's other status positions. In effect, this means that other statuses are factors which affect preferences. The importance of ethnic group membership as a factor in medical practice has been stressed in several studies.2 This paper considers the effect of ethnic origins of physicians on the practice of medicine. The spatial distribution and degree of specialization of Anglo-Saxon, Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Polish physicians in Chicago were studied. The study assumes that the patient is highly concerned with his choice of physician, but does not select him on purely medical grounds. As a consequence, certain nontechnical criteria are assumed to influence this choice.3